Chris Collins says service managers often don't understand financial statements and are evaluated on complaints instead of profit. The industry provides almost no financial training, so managers focus on gross revenue thinking it equals profit, creating resistance to change.
I think maybe your experience is different when you put, when you ask them, like why most of the time it's processes. Like the CSI is inconsistent, the profitability or they're just getting a lot of complaints. Like most of the time dealers or general managers will judge the service manager's performance more on complaints and it could be complaints from employees. So like, well, we just lost three techs. Yep. Or it can be customer complaints. One of the two. Okay, so let's give this context and then we'll, we'll go through your list first. But I think it's important to kind of describe where we are as an industry in relation to service managers. So our answer always is give them to us, don't fire them, give them to us. And they'll say, well, he's close minded. You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Whatever it is. The thing that, that we find consistently over and over again, which is sad and disappointing, is that there are plenty of managers out there functioning with all of the confidence in the world. They're, you know, they believe that they are effective and good managers and they really have no clue what they're doing in the sense they don't see the financial statement. So they're running a business and they're judged on feelings, not on actual outcomes. And so whenever you're judged on feelings and not actual outcomes, there's this huge gap left for interpretation that you can never really find your path because somebody's mood can change in a second. Right. And so it's not tied to, hey, if I accomplish this, I'm safe or I'm, you know, no, I'm doing a good job. Correct? No, it's, well that, that ball is constantly moving. So most managers don't see the financials. They're not aiming their, you know, their.
Intentions towards creating profit, they're aiming their intentions towards gross. So they think more gross has to automatically equal more profit, which is there could not be anything further from the truth. You'll spend your way into gross and you'll lose more money than you were before. And I, how many times have we seen somebody go from 300,000amonth in gross to 500,000amonth in gross and not be making any more money. Right.
So they don't really have something to aim at that is a clear outcome. That clear outcome gets them in and out of trouble. Like you're either, you know, on the favorable side of your employer or the, you know, the bad side. So it's, that's always left up to the weather, it's not, it's not a real thing. We as an industry do nothing to teach them that. So there's zero training for service managers in this area. Most of the training out there like nada. And that sort of stuff leaves them more confused about it than they were before.
It just gets super complicated and they just come back going, well, I, I kind of understand what a debit and a credit is and that really is. We're not trying to make service managers accountants. Yeah, they dive too far into that part of it. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, there's just a simpler way to look at all this and understand all this. So we have somebody who is.
Been living their whole life under the, under the assumption that they're doing a good job or they're good at. They do. Especially us dudes. Right. Like we take our career as something that, that we make a part of our identity. Right. It's like, what do you do? I'm a fireman. It's your identity to be a fireman. Right. And so in our industry, our identity is the thing that we're doing. Our job is our identity. And so.
We tend to justify and close ourselves off to.
New ideas, new ways of doing things. The, the way that service departments are set up is they're a closed loop system. You're doing the same thing every day, all the time. There's no variables to it. What happens or an outcome of a closed loop system, and we talk about this all the time, is you end up being closed minded because it is the same thing all the time. Right. So we have managers that don't understand financials, don't know how to affect financials or the profitability of the department in a, in an effective, easy way. We have their identity, which is to be a manager. And so they're closed off to the idea that there might be a better way to do something.
Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driver Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333 Ask SDR and we'll answer your.
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That's 8333 Ask SDR. For special deals on our books and training, head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I'm Chris Collins and I'll see you.
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